Month: May 2012

Each year VMware puts on a 20.000+ person conference. This year it is in San Francisco and like the last couple years, there are sessions just waiting for you to vote. The more votes, the better chance that yours truly will get to present. I submitted a single presentation this year with Theron Conrey and I speaking together.

Wondering what that means.. well lucky you we also have to have an abstract so here goes.

Deploying training environments for companies can be not only time consuming to create but also expensive to build and maintain. vCloud Director allows for automated self provisioning for virtual lab environments the challenge is integrating these virtual environments with physical devices and systems. This primer demonstrates the physical architecture and virtual configurations needed to connect a virtual datacenter to physical network appliances or systems. The environment consists of a shared authentication strategy with individual vApps per user connected to individual physical device. An architectural example will be dissected to include virtualized vCenter, View and physically attached ESXi hosts being managed through NexentaVSA for View

Please go to VMworld.com and vote for my session.

There are alot of other great sessions out there by all the names you have heard of an probably a few you have not so make sure to read through them all!

Let me start by saying this is 100% a sponsored post but one that I think could be handy for the HP followers among you. HP Discover is one of the larger IT conferences and if you have not attended you are missing out. Many of you will attend the Microsoft and VMware Conferences, maybe even be at EMCWorld this week, but you never thought about going to an HP conference. Many people dont even think about it since they just view HP as those servers I know I am going to buy, or as competition to Dell for the servers. Maybe you look at HP as a printer company. Any of these is valid responses but what you probably didn’t realize was the reach you would get from one company. HP is one of the only companies in the world that covers the entire IT stack from switches, to servers, to printers, whether you are a Windows or a Unix guy you can find something interesting in their portfolio. You add that along with some of the great industry speakers and a chance to see the latest and greatest that a large but still innovative company can bring and you have a recipe for success.

The important part: A $300 discount if you use the code BLOG at this link when registering. Link

The goal of the Gen 8 release was around reducing risk by minimizing manual errors, making administrators tasks more automated. 50% of all datacenter outages are a result of human error and the goal is to eliminate them. Then next segment is to aid the channel partners in growing the small to medium businesses. After some of the discussions yesterday this is refreshing. Many of the talks were around the enterprise and larger IT shops, the components in proactive support are geared to spread from the smallest shop to the largest enterprise. One of the largest changes is the Insight Online and Insight Remote Support solutions.

Insight Online: First cloud-based, personalized dashboard for monitoring device and support status.

Easy of Use

Proactively monitor and manage HP contracts and warranties

View and manage HP service credit balances

Instant, secure visibility to critical asset and support alerts

Create reports for proactive asset and support management

Enable your authorized service provider to monitor and support your infrastructure remotely

Efficiency

Display of 24X7 remote device monitoring of service events

Automated support case generation and status tracking

Automated device discovery and display in Insight Online for users of HP Insight Remote Support 7.0

Access Anytime, Anywhere

24 X 7 monitoring with fast, secure and accurate remote support and service

On premise or off premise secure access

The Remote support solution is the ability for HP to monitor and manage your hardware for any faults and issues 24/7 as a remote service. If there is a failure of equipment, then HP can send gear before the failure occurs.

The combination of Remote Insight and Insight Online publishing to the HP support center gives administrators a remote login to see their system and support maintenance along with current system events and warranties. Currently you will need a HP CMS server that all servers send their data too, from there they will send the data via HTTPs to the Support Center.

One caveat that applies primarily to the federal marketplace is that the functionality does require internet access. Sending data can not yet be done through a proxy that allows for system names and data to be scrubbed prior to sending.

Follow along as I live blog on the HP Gen 8 server deep dive. I am joining a group of other bloggers in Houston for the next two days to see everything from the new marketing strategy to the firmware update process to a deep dive.

“Don’t think of HP as individual components, think of them as Lego blocks that can build what no one else can deliver”

HP is looking to change the server industry in 100 days, by starting with Project Moonshot in Novenber of 2011, high performance servers get changed.. Then Project Odyssey at the end of November, and the last in Project Voyager. A goal to change the way server admins manage systems and transform the basic abilities of server administration. Voyager was deployed in Feb. looks to change multiple things, including:

Manual Operations cost companies on average $24 million over three years

Manual facility optimization drives up energy costs up to $29 million over three years

Unplanned downtime cost clients approximately $10 million an hour.

Project Voyager = Proliant Gen8 servers publicly. The goal is the world’s most self sufficient servers. The first addition discussed is the Proactive Insight Architecture. The results of intelligence and automation include:

3x Admin productivity improvement

6x Performance for the most demanding workloads

70% more compute per watt

66% faster time to problem resolution

“Dont think of Project Voyager as just the Gen 8 servers but think of it as a solutions, service and datacenter…many of the solutions and benefits can result in less than a 5 month ROI.” This gives admins 30 more days a year to innovate for your business

Being the largest server vendor in the world gives HP the benefit of also talking to the most customers. It allows HP to collect data on the inhibitors and barriers the users face to shift and form the R&D strategy. Gen 8 was a $300 million R&D investment.

The goal is to make the server part of the datacenter not just a component. Finding out information like is this server running hot or is the datacenter near it hot is not available in todays servers. The Gen8 adds this intelligence. It also adds functionality to integrate support and move it from a manual process to an automated one. On the motherboard there is a sea of sensors, along with the active health system, that logs and runs policies against the equipment.

HP System Update Manager is designed to fix the industry wide issue of firmware updates. It provides update checking and dependency checks all within one tool, including testing dependencies and firmware that will fail if ran together. It will even tell you when you need reboots. Over 1600 points on the server are monitored at any given time.

The growth of SSD allows for 100x the storage performance from the Gen7 systems. HP not has caching mechanism with SSD backed DRAM. There is also a new algorithm to allow for multiple VMs that provide random writes to a smart array to be reorders to allow each VM to write sequentially. More on this later…

The next step of growth is for the datacenter. HP now has intelligent PDU to not only monitor per server but throughout the datacenter. Location services are also added. One key add on is the ability to tell you if you power both power supplies into a single leg and have no redundant power. The location based section will utilize a location sensor that can be added to a rack and a sensor in the rail kit. More later on what racks this can be added to. It is know that many places will not replace all racks just o use Gen 8 servers.

Some new additions are inspired by customer. First is a smart socket guide built in conjunction with Intel. Allows for proper CPU install without causing motherboard failures. Traditional CPU on the left. Smart Socket on the Right

The second would be the Smart drive do-not-remove indicator. When a drive is in a state that it should not be removed because it is a single component of a RAID set that is active then the light will remind you not to pull the drive.

Intel and HP: Partnering to drive perfromance and architecture innovations

Presenter: Keith Kirkendall : Intel Senior Applications Engineer

Intel places people similar to Keith with the major vendors to work on direct integration with the major manufacturers. The release of the Xeon e5 is the latest release included in the server processor family. Enhancements include almost doubling the system IO on the motherboard, by integrating PCie onto the motherboard along with other enhancements. An 80% increase in floating point calculations. There is a 50% improvement is power management with the e5.

HP Transforming the Server Market

Presenter: John Gromala, Director IIS Blades to Cloud

Focusing on embedded management inovations that are intended to improve the lifecycle of the servers. One of those issues is the firmware update process. This process according to customers was the most time intensive component of server management. A three phase circular process from HP allows to help with these issues. Intelligent Provisioning to Smart Update to Active Health monitoring. All of it is based on the upgrade to the iLO management engine.

Intelligent Provisioning

HP Active Health

HP Smart Update

3x faster system deployment with HP Smart Update

Analyzes over 1600 system parameters

3x faster update process

Smarter startup in 3 secs.

Proactively finds and fixes problems

69% reduction in operator time

5x faster to start the problem analysis

The biggest change in the firmware process is solution based deployment and testing. Service pack releases are tested fully integrated. You can now set different updates depending on your own server separation. You can change timing as well as which updates get applied depending on the groups you assign.

Firmware Update Process – Old to New:

HP is the first in the industry to not only add AD integrated firmware decisions, but also allows you full rollback and downgrade of both drivers and firmware. Although it is not currently supported on Virtual Connect drivers.During the installs you can schedule some updates, as well as provide the following reports:

Inventory Selections

Target Firmware Details

Target Installable Details

Failed Dependency Details

Installed Details

Each report can be viewed as HTML and XML to import directly into CMDB .

Demo of the mobile app for both Android and iOS. Allows remote console and system management from tablets and smartphones.